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  Once, as he was stepping around the dog at the threshold, Renee sprang up from her sleep and seized his sneaker. It happened so fast. For a moment I thought he was shouting at me because I hadn’t answered his question, hadn’t said whether I was okay. I started shouting back before I realized he was kicking my dog.

  “That’s what I’m saying!” he told me when we got outside. I could see his pulse distorting his neck, going under his skin like a little burrowing bug. He rolled up the leg of his pants and tenderly pressed his shin. The skin wasn’t even broken, just dented where teeth had pressed down. “Dogs like that have lockjaws, Craig. I’m not making this up. You need to pry open their jaws when they bite down hard, which is not something you want to get messed up with.”

  “Bullshit,” I said.

  He was furious, and then—in that flip he can do with his emotions, like wiping a chalkboard—he calmed down. He shoved a sleeve of blond hair back from his eyes. He climbed into the driver’s seat of my car. “Believe what you want.”

  I wondered that night after he left, where the fuck did he get this stuff? Even as a child, he was always reading everything he could get his hands on—cereal boxes, Hardy Boys books, comic books, encyclopedias—because he had no sense of imagination. It was like he could make nothing up on his own; he couldn’t care less about the games we invented on the playground. The problem with my brother was that he had no ability to hold two realities in his mind at once, the hypothetical and the concrete, so he conflated the two. Which made him paranoid in his teenage years, afraid of murderers and weather and germs, unwilling to leave the house for a full month when he was thirteen. Dad got really pissed at him, and I’d have to coax him from his room at night with a frozen lasagna. At some point around then, he starting washing his hands so many times a day, the floor of our bathroom stayed damp all the time. A strange kind of mold grew up between the tiles, and it was too green to be normal, and I didn’t like to look at it.

  According to the new schedule, my brother picks us up at nine on Sundays. Because it’s my wife’s new church we’re going to I’ve started letting her sit in front. Last week, I sat in the backseat between Charlotte and Jeremy, who were quiet and stiff as statues—Charlotte, because she was wearing a new dress, something my wife’s church acquaintance had given her. It was calico and shapeless, with a stained lace apron sewed on the front. Charlotte was thinking of herself as a pioneer on a prairie. I could see it in the way she crossed her hands over her lap and whispered to herself about Ma and Pa. She murmured, “Pa says we’ve got to go into town,” and it dawned on me that Pa was the one up front, the one driving this carriage. She wanted Jeremy to hold her pretend cat, and when he wouldn’t, she handed it to me. “Okay, Brother Baker?” she asked. I wondered, Who the hell is that? But I obliged, reluctantly, putting one hand on either side of empty space.

  Jeremy was silent because he was upset about what had happened before we left. He’d refused to get in the car. He’d pulled off his good shirt—in a sleight-of-body gesture that looked more bird than human—and wailed, “I don’t want to go to church!” loud enough for his mother in the car to hear him. When I said, “Stop it!” he’d run out of the garage and into the front yard. He threw his shirt into the street. I took off after him, tackled him when he dove into the bristly dead grass, wrestled him into my body. I got his scrawny bare arms locked over his chest and hissed, “You need to go to church for Mommy. She’s sick, so she gets to say. Got that, buster?”

  I took Renee to just that one obedience class in September. That was after she broke through the screen and chased the UPS man, who threatened to report her. Renee sat on command and heeled like a pro, everyone said so. Her choke collar clinked loosely as jewelry around her neck. For Leave It we were the class model; everyone stood in a circle and watched. But then, when I did the thing where you unclasp the leash and take ten steps back, when I did that and said, “Come!” Renee tore after this little white rug of a dog and got it by the neck. In the car on the way home, Renee sat panting in the front seat. Charlotte was squeezed between Renee and the door, her pale little arms draped over Renee’s massive shoulders. It had been Charlotte who’d known what to do, in class, who’d jumped up from her folding chair and thrown herself on Renee. She’d kicked that floppy little dog away like a champ.

  But she’d heard, afterward, what the trainer had said about Renee. One more incident like this and she’ll have to be put down. In the car, Charlotte clung helplessly to the dog. Renee ignored her completely.

  “We’ll just have to keep her away from danger,” I said. “Keep her away from other dogs and strangers.” My fingers were shaking. I couldn’t keep them in their plastic grooves on the steering wheel. The windshield wipers kept going, shush, shush, shush, and there was something oddly thrilling about that, as if Charlotte and Renee and I were all in on a secret.

  “I’m so afraid,” Charlotte said, her arms around the dog. “I’m so afraid.”

  “You’re pretending to love God,” my wife accused me recently.

  This was after my brother caught me sleeping in church. He’d nudged me awake, saying in his wheedling, self-righteous voice, “Come on, Craig. Be a little more respectful.” I’d stood up then and walked out. I’d had to press past a dozing old woman, waking her up, and Jeremy, who was on the floor with trucks.

  I didn’t have the keys to the car, so I sat on the cold metal hood and bounced the whole thing down and up. After a minute, my brother came out, jacketless. He was wearing gloves, though, black leather. He stood a few feet away and clapped his leathered hands together, saying, “I’m not, I’m really not, working against you, man.”

  I thought about that. I thought about all the stories I used to tell him at night—the armless boys, the ghost ships, everything. I gave him everything good of mine I could think of because, for reasons no one could account for, he always seemed to have so little.

  “You feel better, now?” I asked him, bouncing down hard on the hood. “You like your new car? It gets good mileage, right? And it’s nice to have a family, a wife, even if she’s—”

  “Don’t.” He put two leather hands together. Pulled them apart.

  “Don’t what?”

  He gave me a look like when he’d come home when we were kids and I’d dismantled the bunk bed. “What step you on, Craig? Is this one of the steps?”

  “Get off my back.”

  After he dropped us all off at home, the kids stayed in their jackets in the living room, Charlotte roping herself over the dog and watching some orchestral cartoon violence on TV. At some point I noticed she was sweating. Her hair was damp around her ears. Jeremy sat with his sleeves pushed up, humming and sucking his thumb, arranging the dollhouse furniture in an elaborate free-standing tower.

  My wife called me into our bedroom, and her hands were cold when she touched my cheeks. She said she wanted her slippers. There was something in her voice that climbed stairs, that got so much higher than me suddenly.

  “Are you pretending?” she asked, when I pushed one of her feet into the plush insides of the pterodactyl. “Will you stop all this?” She wouldn’t say when I’m gone.

  “All what?”

  She closed her eyes. “You know. Going to church, doing your meetings.”

  I slid her other foot into the slipper, pushing my hand in too and leaving it there a moment. I lay my head against her knee. Of course I am, I thought.

  I’m pretending to love God because I really love her, and isn’t that good? Isn’t that good enough?

  I decide to circle back past the house. The snow is coming down in gusts, dragging over parked cars and pulling things off the ground. Dead leaves do a miniature cyclone over a gutter. An orange garage sale sign sails past, kite-like, weirdly lovely. All the neighbors have gone inside except the one I talked to when I first set out, the one who keeps at it like a dirge. “Reneee! Reneee! Reneee!” I can’t stand to pass by that man again, so I take the long way home, behind the school. The t
ires of my bike roll smoothly over the new snow, then stop rolling and slide, and then start rolling again. As I near the house, I think I see someone in the front yard playing in the snow. That’s what it looks like from a block away, like someone rolling those balls to make igloos, or flapping their arms around, angel-style. And then I realize it’s Renee I’m watching. Renee, come home all on her own. She’s rolling joyously, thrashing something, and it’s only because I’ve stopped watching the ground in front of me that the tires slip. I fall sideways into a freshly plowed bank, but the landing is so soft, so forgiving. It doesn’t feel like falling.

  “Renee!” I say, with a surge of relief, as the dog gets up and runs toward me, and I open my arms to catch her. There’s snow everywhere. She seems to be crying.

  I hear Charlotte calling the dog inside and slamming the door.

  I realize then it’s Jeremy, not Renee, I have in my arms. He seems barely more substantial than the wet clothes he’s wearing. He must be half, a third, of Renee’s weight. Less than that even. “Dad!” he sobs.

  There’s something I always think of when I’m trying to quiet Jeremy down, when Charlotte’s knocked his tower over, or when I’m putting him to bed. I’ll be arranging the blankets, telling him the kinds of stories he likes, the ones with bees, but in another part of my mind, I’m thinking about Jeremiah Peter Black. Jeremiah Peter is from a race of parapsychic men. He lives in the aftermath of the apocalypse, a few years after Charlotta Grey, and because he’s smart, it doesn’t take long for Jeremiah to understand that it was his mind, and people with minds like his, that caused the disaster—that by a sheer accident of nightmarish daydreaming, knives had drifted up off of tables into people’s necks. Whole forests burned to stumpy trunks, and rivers ran crimson. In his grief, in his unrelenting, dry-mouthed guilt, Jeremiah Peter Black creates a new sect, a priesthood called Control Thought, and every day he trains himself in his pile of potshards to think of fruit trees and libraries and canned soup. He falls in love, grows old, trains doe-eyed pupils to lick their empty palms and taste sugar. The world rebuilds, and Jeremiah sees it all with satisfaction. And yet, he senses behind each well-intentioned thought the shadow he veers away from, the torch, the gleaming knife, the explosion of light, and just as he congratulates himself on avoiding these things, they appear of course—the old crumbling world coming alive again, in which everything is a skull—and he sees with horror how the shadow eats its source, and so his own cells disintegrate, piece by piece, mitochondria by leaf, brick by fingertip, until there is nothing left.

  That’s not a good story. When my wife finished Shepherd of the Deep, she wouldn’t speak to me for a whole day. But I don’t think it was because she was mad. She was twenty-six that year, and I remember for Christmas she sewed me a quilt with fluffy white clouds and mountains, a brook. We made love under that quilt. But the book did poorly. It sold only sold nine hundred copies, and I never read it again after it was done. I may even be remembering it wrong.

  Jeremy clings to me, sobbing.

  I say, “You alright?”

  They’d made a snowman, he tells me.

  He pulls back, pushing a piece of mangled skin over his eyes with two fingers. Blood pours down his face.

  He adds, bawling, “Renee ruined it!”

  His snot is pink, then bright red. His mittens have come off and they dangle by silver clips from his wrists. When I lift him up, I swear, he floats. I feel like I’ve tossed him in the air and I need to catch hold of him again before he gets away. I pull him down and onto my back, because he’s my son and I will not call my brother now. I will not. I say to him, “Can you hold on?” and though he doesn’t answer, I know he will. As I go down the road on my bike, I am very, very careful. I’m as careful as I’ve ever been. My fingers fit the grooves in the handlebars, each finger in its place, and the tires hold the road. The hospital is two miles away, and the whole way there, I feel his arms around my neck, his breath in my ear. The snow comes down so hard there isn’t any sound.

  We’ve been to Saint Vincent’s so many times with his mom, Jeremy is almost bored with it. He won’t be distracted by toys. He wants the nurses to talk to him. After I’ve filled out the paperwork at the desk, I go back into the drab little room where they’ve taken him for his stitches. In the doorway, I hear a nurse with inch-long red fingernails say to him, touching her own face, “What happened? What brought you here, honey?”

  I freeze. But he misunderstands the question. “On the bike.”

  There’s a pause while the nurse is nodding. Jeremy goes on explaining, moving from effect to cause the way he does, working his way backward. “The police said to stop driving the car. Daddy was too funny with the beer. That was way before Halloween.”

  I’m surprised by how much he knows, but only for a moment, because the surprise itself makes the moment unreal, almost exciting, and I am released the way you are when you hear a bad story about someone else, or get to a sad part in a book that you’ve long been expecting. I wait for a feeling that doesn’t come. And then the nurse says, “What?” and anything might happen, but nothing does, because as I go into the room I sense in a rush that Jeremy’s mistake about her question might also be a lucky break. I learned long ago how important it is to capitalize on misunderstandings. In the moment before the nurse turns around, before I gather up Jeremy in my arms, I think of how we first found Renee. I think of how Charlotte opened the car door after I thought I’d hit something along the road—how I’d driven off the shoulder again, and there was a bump so I slowed—and this huge creature had leapt into the backseat. She was indifferent to us, wet with snow, unharmed. I could have cried. It had been like being forgiven everything.

  I say to the nurse at Saint Vincent’s, letting my voice be angry for a second, “There’s some goddamn loose dog on the streets. What can you do?”

  The nurse looks pained, takes her claw-like hand and puts it against her chest.

  I lift Jeremy up and put him on my back again, and he does not complain. He fits perfectly. On the ride home, I ask into the wind, “You okay, Little Bullfrog?” He says his eye hurts, but only when he opens it.

  I tell him then we’re going to have a secret. I tell him we need to be careful what we say around Mommy because we all love Renee, him and Charlotte and me, and she didn’t mean to be bad. I make myself clear. “Listen,” I say. “We have to tell Mommy something else, it was your bike that did it, you fell, and we have to tell her that because she’s sick right now. Got it?”

  We bike toward our house in the snow. My son is just the right weight on my back, not too heavy, just heavy enough, and I almost don’t want to slow down as we approach our driveway. It’s too good a thing to carry around my son like this. I don’t have to pedal for a moment, and we move in an effortless drift through tiny whips of fresh snow. There is no one now outside. All the neighbors have their evening programs to watch, or herbs to pot in their basements. Even the snowplow is just distant lights, a slow senseless blinking in another neighborhood altogether. We have the whole road to ourselves. It is only when we get closer to home that I see Charlotte standing there right inside the screen door, looking out. She’s squinting suspiciously into the night, trying to tell what is what in the dark, and Renee looms beside her—statuesque, surreal, guard against all evil—and so I lean the bike against the railing and lift up my son and we go inside.

  TIME DIFFERENCE

  “It’s raining in Hollywood.” Her brother’s voice skips notes.

  “It is raining,” she tells him over the phone. “That’s some magic you have there, the Internet.” When his silence sails past comfortable, she adds, “Everything okay in the Dairy State?”

  “Why are you asking?” His voice is pentatonic, black-keyed.

  “It’s pretty late—”

  “It’s just after eleven!”

  “Okay, okay,” she soothes.

  For a moment she thinks he’s right, there’s nothing wrong. And she feels bad for her chast
ising tone, for wanting off the phone, until she remembers he’s obscured an important point that establishes their distance.

  “My time it’s almost midnight,” she tells him. “Your time it’s nearly two.”

  *

  Her mother on the phone the next morning is apologetic. “Did I wake you up?”

  “Well—” She pours coffee to clear her head and sits down in front of the window, out of which she sees two doves nicking and fluffing each other with beaks. They’re perched on a wet wire, and every time they touch, the whole thing drips across the yard.

  “How’re you doing? Did you say you’ve been volunteering?”

  “Yeah.” She holds the mug on her knee, feeling the warmth spread through her from that one point. She’s proud of her good intentions and worried at the same time that they’re just that, with no underlying fact of generosity. She tells her mother, “It’s nothing. I haven’t really started yet. I just finished training.”

  The birds outside lift the feathers on their necks like hackles: now doves, now tiny spiked predators. Her neighbor in his yellow car has flooded his engine trying to get it started. It occurs to her, suddenly, that her mother must have forgotten the time difference, too, or else why would she call so early on a Friday morning? “I’m a little groggy. I’m sorry, Mom. You know, it’s still pretty early here.”

  “Your brother’s in jail.”

  “Okay.” She closes her eyes, opens them.

  She tries to think about how he sounded last night on the phone, whether she knew and ignored what’s obvious when she looks back on it. But the doves shimmy across the wire, and her mind drifts. While she’s thinking about how she used to call her brother from a friend’s house when they were kids, while she’s thinking about how she used to say, “The Wizard’s coming for you,” and how thrilled her little brother had been, how terrified, while she’s thinking about how it seemed like she was blessing him at the time, but how her pleasure might also have come from succeeding in the lie, her mother tells her about her brother’s second DWI. Then, without any noticeable transition, her mother starts talking about her own father, who died in 1957 on a wheat farm in Texas. She explains the difference between summer wheat and winter wheat, how the latter sprouts with the first freeze and then lies dormant till spring.